Speaker
Description
Detailed analysis
The worldwide Earth science community, with its mosaic of disciplines and players (academia, industry, national surveys, international organizations, and so forth), provides a scientific basis for addressing societal issues. These capabilities require that the Earth science community utilize, both in real and remote time, massive amounts of data, which are usually distributed among many different organizations and data centers. It explains the interest of this community for Grid technology, the variety of applications ported as well as the tools developed. Besides the participation in EGEE through the ES cluster, other projects involving ES disciplines were or have been carried out as related projects to EGEE such as CYCLOPS, SEEGrid, EELA2. Projects outside of the context of EGEE are e.g., in the framework of WGISS/CEOS.
Partners from these projects have shown a strong scientific and technical interest to work together in the ES VRC. The transition from a central support-based model to a model driven by each VRC is ongoing and will lead to sustainable Grid infrastructure and VRCs. In order to achieve this transition, the ES VRC joins the A&A and Fusion VRCs in a common EU proposal
Impact
The ES VRC consists of 9 Virtual Organizations with partners in 23 European or associated countries and links to EELA2, EUAsia and African partners. This structure will permit to extend the Grid knowledge within the ES VRC and increase the collaboration among the communities, by sharing expertise. The transition period is focused on building a self-reliant and sustainable VRC. The goal is to increase the number of scientists that make use of the infrastructure through focused training and dissemination. To expand and support Grid uptake within ESFRI other related community scientific projects are important too. In this new organizational model, ES VRC will support its user community for domain specific applications, techniques, data sets and other non conventional Grid resources (e.g. instruments and network sensors), and will safeguard its expertise into a knowledge repository. ES VRC has to fulfill the requirements addressed by its user community; this could trigger the development of new components or interfaces for specific domains, and the re-design and implementation of tools and services related to the middleware evolution.
Conclusions and Future Work
The transition has started with EGEE-III The sharing of experience in the framework of dedicated workshops is important to set up more concretely collaborations and specific objectives. New institutions especially from east Europe are included to the ES VRC. Today’s ES VO is being opened to partners with less or no hardware resource. A knowledge database will be extracted from the ES-Cluster and continued after EGEE-III and the independent Website of the ES cluster will be extended to a Science Gateway. The ES VRC will organize and provide old and new services within the community.
| URL for further information | euearthsciencegrid.org |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Earthscience VRC EGI Prace |
